Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States

RALPH PETERS

When you leave the classroom or office and go into
the world, you see at first its richness and confusions, the variety and
tumult. Then, if you keep moving and do not quit looking, commonalties
begin to emerge. National success is eccentric. But national failure is
programmed and predictable. Spotting the future losers among the world's
states becomes so easy it loses its entertainment value.

In this world of multiple and simultaneous revolutions--in technology,
information, social organization, biology, economics, and convenience--the
rules of international competition have changed. There is a global marketplace
and, increasingly, a global economy. While there is no global culture yet,
American popular culture is increasingly available and wickedly appealing--and
there are no international competitors in the field, only struggling local
systems. Where the United States does not make the rules of international
play, it shapes them by its absence.

The invisible hand of the market has become an informal but uncompromising
lawgiver. Globalization demands conformity to the practices of the global
leaders, especially to those of the United States. If you do not conform--or
innovate--you lose. If you try to quit the game, you lose even more profoundly.
The rules of international competition, whether in the economic, cultural,
or conventional military fields, grow ever more homogeneous. No government
can afford practices that retard development. Yet such practices are often
so deeply embedded in tradition, custom, and belief that the state cannot
jettison them. That which provides the greatest psychological comfort to
members of foreign cultures is often that which renders them noncompetitive
against America's explosive creativity--our self-reinforcing dynamism fostered
by law, efficiency, openness, flexibility, market discipline, and social
mobility.

Traditional indicators of noncompetitive performance still apply: corruption
(the most seductive activity humans can consummate while clothed); the
absence of sound, equitably enforced laws; civil strife; or government
attempts to overmanage a national economy. As change has internationalized
and accelerated, however, new predictive tools have emerged. They are as
simple as they are fundamental, and they are rooted in culture. The greater
the degree to which a state--or an entire civilization--succumbs to these
"seven deadly sins" of collective behavior, the more likely that
entity is to fail to progress or even to maintain its position in the struggle
for a share of the world's wealth and power. Whether analyzing military
capabilities, cultural viability, or economic potential, these seven factors
offer a quick study of the likely performance of a state, region, or population
group in the coming century.

The Seven Factors

These key "failure factors" are:

Restrictions on the free flow of information.

The subjugation of women.

Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.

The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.

Domination by a restrictive religion.

A low valuation of education.

Low prestige assigned to work.

Zero-Sum Knowledge

The wonderfully misunderstood Clausewitzian trinity, expressed crudely
as state-people-military, is being replaced by a powerful new trinity:
the relationship between the state, the people, and information. In the
latter phases of the industrial age, the free flow of quality information
already had become essential to the success of industries and military
establishments. Ifthe internationalizing media toppled the Soviet
empire, it was because that empire's battle against information-sharing
had hollowed out its economy and lost the confidence of its people. When
a sudden flood of information strikes a society or culture suffering an
information deficit, the result is swift destabilization. This is now a
global phenomenon.

Today's "flat-worlders" are those who believe that information
can be controlled. Historically, information always equaled power. Rulers
and civilizations viewed knowledge as a commodity to be guarded, a thing
finite in its dimensions and lost when shared. Religious institutions viewed
knowledge as inflammatory and damnable, a thing to be handled carefully
and to advantage, the nuclear energy of yesteryear. The parallel to the
world public's view of wealth is almost exact--an instinctive conviction
that information is a thing to be gotten and hoarded, and that its possession
by a foreign actor means it has been, by vague and devious means, robbed
from oneself and one's kind. But just as wealth generates wealth, so knowledge
begets knowledge. Without a dynamic and welcoming relationship with information
as content and process, no society can compete in the post-industrial age.

Information-controlling governments and knowledge-denying religions
cripple themselves and their subjects or adherents. If America's streets
are not paved with gold, they are certainly littered with information.
The availability of free, high-quality information, and a people's ability
to discriminate between high- and low-quality data, are essential to economic
development beyond the manufacturing level. Whether on our own soil
or abroad, those segments of humanity that fear and reject knowledge of
the world (and, often, of themselves) are condemned to failure, poverty,
and bitterness.

The ability of most of America's work force to cope psychologically
and practically with today's flood of data, and to cull quality data from
the torrent, is remarkable--a national and systemic triumph. Even Canada
and Britain cannot match it. Much of Japan's present stasis is attributable
to that nation's struggle to make the transition from final-stage industrial
power to information-age society. The more regulated flow of information
with which Japan has long been comfortable is an impediment to post-modernism.
While the Japanese nation ultimately possesses the synthetic capability
to overcome this difficulty, its structural dilemmas are more informational
and psychological than tangible--although the tangible certainly matters--and
decades of educational reform and social restructuring will be necessary
before Japan returns for another world-championship match.

In China, the situation regarding the state's attempt to control information
and the population's inability to manage it is immeasurably worse. Until
China undergoes a genuine cultural revolution that alters permanently and
deeply the relationship among state, citizen, and information, that country
will bog down at the industrial level. Its sheer size guarantees continued
growth, but there will be a flattening in the coming decades and, decisively,
China will have great difficulty transitioning from smokestack growth to
intellectual innovation and service wealth.

China, along with the world's other defiant dictatorships, suffers under
an oppressive class structure, built on and secured by an informational
hierarchy. The great class struggle of the 21st century will be for access
to data, and it will occur in totalitarian and religious-regime states.
The internet may prove to be the most revolutionary tool since the movable-type
printing press. History laughs at us all--the one economic analyst who
would understand immediately what is happening in the world today would
be a resurrected German "content provider" named Marx.

For countries and cultures that not only restrict but actively reject
information that contradicts governmental or cultural verities, even a
fully industrialized society remains an unattainable dream. Information
is more essential to economic progress than an assured flow of oil. In
fact, unearned, "found" wealth is socially and economically cancerous,
impeding the development of healthy, enduring socioeconomic structures
and values. If you want to guarantee an underdeveloped country's continued
inability to perform competitively, grant it rich natural resources. The
sink-or-swim poverty of northwestern Europe and Japan may have been their
greatest natural advantage during their developmental phases. As the Shah
learned and Saudi Arabia is proving, you can buy only the products, not
the productiveness, of another civilization.

States that censor information will fail to compete economically, culturally,
and militarily in the long run. The longer the censorship endures, the
longer the required recovery time. Even after the strictures have been
lifted, information-deprived societies must play an almost-hopeless game
of catch-up. In Russia, it will take at least a generation of genuine informational
freedom to facilitate an economic takeoff that is not founded hollowly
upon resource extraction, middleman profits, and the looting of industrial
ruins. Unique China will need even longer to make the next great leap forward
from industrial to informational economy--we have at least half a century's
advantage. Broad portions of the planet may never make it. We will not
need a military to deal with foreign success, but to respond to foreign
failure--which will be the greatest source of violence in coming decades.

If you are looking for an easy war, fight an information-controlling
state. If you are looking for a difficult investment, invest in an information-controlling
state. If you are hunting a difficult conflict, enter the civil strife
that arises after the collapse of an information-controlling state. If
you are looking for a good investment, find an emerging or "redeemed"
state unafraid of science, hard numbers, and education.

A Woman's Place

Vying with informational abilities as a key factor in the reinvigoration
of the US economy has been the pervasive entry of American women into the
educational process and the workplace. When the stock market soars, thank
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragettes, not just their beneficiary,
Alan Greenspan. After a century and a half of struggle by English and American
women, the US economy now operates at a wartime level of human-resource
commitment on a routine basis.

Despite eternally gloomy headlines, our country probably has the lowest
wastage rate of human talent in the world. The United States is so chronically
hungry for talent that we drain it from the rest of the planet at a crippling
pace, and we have accepted that we cannot squander the genius of half our
population. Even in Europe, "over-skilling," in which inherent
and learned abilities wither in calcified workplaces, produces social peace
at the cost of cultural and economic lethargy, security at the price of
mediocrity. The occasional prime minister notwithstanding, it is far rarer
to encounter a female executive, top professional, or general officer in
that mythologized, "more equitable" Europe than in the United
States. Life in America may not be fair, but neither is it stagnant. What
we lose in security, we more than compensate for in opportunity.

While Europe sleepwalks toward a 35-hour work-week, we are moving toward
the 35-hour day. The intense performance of our economy would be unattainable
without the torrent of energy introduced by competitive female job candidates.
American women revolutionized the workforce and the workplace. Future social
and economic historians will probably judge that the entry of women into
our workforce was the factor that broke the stranglehold of American trade
unions and gave a new lease on life to those domestic industries able to
adapt. American women were the Japanese cars of business labor relations:
better, cheaper, dependable, and they defied the rules. Everybody had to
work harder and smarter to survive, but the results have been a spectacular
recovery of economic leadership and soaring national wealth.

Change that men long resisted and feared in our own country resulted
not only in greater competition for jobs, but in the creation of more jobs,
and not in the rupture of the economy, but in its assumption of imperial
dimensions (in a quirk of fate, already privileged males are getting much
richer, thanks to the effects of feminism's triumph on the stock market).
Equality of opportunity is the most profitable game going, and American
capitalism has realized the wisdom of becoming an evenhanded consumer of
skills. Despite serious exclusions and malignant social problems, we are
the most efficient society in history. When Europeans talk of the dignity
of the working man, they increasingly mean the right of that man to sit
at a desk doing nothing or to stand at an idling machine. There is a huge
difference between just being employed and actually working.

The math isn't hard. Any country or culture that suppresses half its
population, excluding them from economic contribution and wasting
energy keeping them out of the school and workplace, is not going to perform
competitively with us. The standard counterargument heard in failing states
is that there are insufficient jobs for the male population, thus it is
impossible to allow women to compete for the finite incomes available.
The argument is archaic and wrong. When talent enters a work force, it
creates jobs. Competition improves performance. In order to begin to compete
with the American leviathan and the stronger of the economies of Europe
and the Far East, less-developed countries must maximize their human potential.
Instead, many willfully halve it.

The point isn't really the fear that women will steal jobs in Country
X. Rather, it's a fundamental fear of women--or of a cultural caricature
of women as incapable, stupid, and worrisomely sexual. If, when you get
off the plane, you do not see men and women sitting together in the airport
lounge, put your portfolio or treaty on the next flight home.

It is difficult for any human being to share power already possessed.
Authority over their women is the only power many males will ever enjoy.
From Greece to the Ganges, half the world is afraid of girls and gratified
by their subjugation. It is a prescription for cultural mediocrity, economic
failure--and inexpressible boredom. The value added by the training and
utilization of our female capital is an American secret weapon.

Blaming Foreign Devils

The cult of victimhood, a plague on the least-successful elements in
our own society, retards the development of entire continents. When individuals
or cultures cannot accept responsibility for their own failures, they will
repeat the behaviors that led to failure. Accepting responsibility for
failure is difficult, and correspondingly rare. The cultures of North America,
Northern Europe, Japan, and Korea (each in its own way) share an unusual
talent for looking in the mirror and keeping their eyes open. Certainly,
there is no lack of national vanity, prejudice, subterfuge, or bad behavior.

But in the clutch we are surprisingly good at saying, "We did it,
so let's fix it." In the rest of the world, a plumbing breakdown implicates
the CIA and a faltering currency means George Soros--the Hungarian-born
American billionaire, fund manager, and philanthropist--has been sneaking
around in the dark. Recent accusations of financial connivance made against
Mr. Soros and then against the Jews collectively by Malaysia's Prime Minister
Mahathir only demonstrated that Malaysia's ambitions had gotten ahead of
its cultural capacity to support them. Even if foreign devils are to blame--and
they mostly are not--whining and blustering does not help. It only makes
you feel better for a little while, like drunkenness, and there are penalties
the morning after.

The failure is greater where the avoidance of responsibility is greater.
In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, oil money has masked cultural, social,
technical, and structural failure for decades. While the military failure
of the regional states has been obvious, consistent, and undeniable, the
locals sense--even when they do not fully understand--their noncompetitive
status in other spheres as well. It is hateful and disorienting to them.
Only the twin blessings of Israel and the United States, upon whom Arabs
and Persians can blame even their most egregious ineptitudes, enable a
fly-specked pretense of cultural viability.

On the other hand, Latin America has made tremendous progress. Not long
ago, the gringos were to blame each time the lights blinked. But with the
rise of a better-educated elite and local experience of economic success,
the leadership of Latin America's key states has largely stopped playing
the blame game. Smaller states and drug-distorted economies still chase
scapegoats, but of the major players only Mexico still indulges routinely
in the transfer of all responsibility for its problems to Washington, D.C.

Family Values

After the exclusion of women from productive endeavors, the next-worst
wastage of human potential occurs in societies where the extended family,
clan, or tribe is the basic social unit. While family networks provide
a safety net in troubled times, offering practical support and psychological
protection, and may even build a house for you, they do not build the rule
of law, or democracy, or legitimate corporations, or free markets. Where
the family or clan prevails, you do not hire the best man (to say nothing
of the best woman) for the job, you hire Cousin Luis. You do not vote for
the best man, you vote for Uncle Ali. And you do not consider cease-fire
deals or shareholder interests to be matters of serious obligation.

Such cultures tend to be peasant-based or of peasant origin, with the
attendant peasant's suspicion of the outsider and of authority. Oligarchies
of landed families freeze the pattern in time. There is a preference for
a dollar grabbed today over a thousand dollars accrued in the course of
an extended business relationship. Blood-based societies operate under
two sets of rules: one, generally honest, for the relative; and another,
ruthless and amoral, for deals involving the outsider. The receipt of money
now is more important than building a long-term relationship. Such societies
fight well as tribes, but terribly as nations.

At its most successful, this is the system of the Chinese diaspora,
but that is a unique case. The Darwinian selection that led to the establishment
and perpetuation of the great Chinese merchant families (and village networks),
coupled with the steely power of southern China's culture, has made this
example an exception to many rules. More typical examples of the Vetternwirtschaft
system are Iranian businesses, Nigerian criminal organizations, Mexican
political and drug cartels, and some American trade unions.

Where blood ties rule, you cannot trust the contract, let alone the
handshake. Nor will you see the delegation of authority so necessary to
compete in the modern military or economic spheres. Information and wealth
are assessed from a zero-sum worldview. Corruption flourishes. Blood ties
produce notable family successes, but they do not produce competitive societies.

That Old-Time Religion

Religion feeds a fundamental human appetite for meaning and security,
and it can lead to powerful social unity and psychological assurance that
trumps science. Untempered, it leads to xenophobia, backwardness, savagery,
and economic failure. The more intense a religion is, the more powerful
are its autarchic tendencies. But it is impossible to withdraw from today's
world.

Limiting the discussion to the sphere of competitiveness, there appear
to be two models of socio-religious integration that allow sufficient informational
and social dynamism for successful performance. First, religious homogeneity
can work, if, as in the case of Japan, religion is sufficiently subdued
and malleable to accommodate applied science. The other model--that of
the United States--is of religious coexistence, opening the door for science
as an "alternative religion." Americans have, in fact, such wonderful
plasticity of mind that generally even the most vividly religious can disassociate
antibiotic drugs from the study of Darwin and the use of birth-control
pills from the strict codes of their churches. All religions breed some
amount of schism between theology and social practice, but the American
experience is a marvel of mental agility and human innovation.

The more dogmatic and exclusive the religion, the less it is able to
deal with the information age, in which multiple "truths" may
exist simultaneously, and in which all that cannot be proven empirically
is inherently under assault. We live in a time of immense psychological
dislocation--when man craves spiritual certainty even more than usual.
Yet our age is also one in which the sheltering dogma cripples individuals
and states alike. The price of competitiveness is the courage to be uncertain--not
an absence of belief, but a synthetic capability that can at once accommodate
belief and its contradictions. Again, the United States possesses more
than its share of this capability, while other societies are encumbered
by single dominant religions as hard, unbending--and ultimately brittle--as
iron. Religious toleration also means the toleration of scientific research,
informational openness, and societal innovation. "One-true-path"
societies and states are on a path that leads only downward.

For those squeamish about judging the religion of another, there is
a shortcut that renders the same answer on competitiveness: examine the
state's universities.

Learning Power and Earning Power

The quality of a state's universities obviously reflects local wealth,
but, even more important, the effectiveness of higher education in a society
describes its attitudes toward knowledge, inquiry-versus-dogma, and the
determination of social standing. In societies imprisoned by dogmatic religions,
or in which a caste or class system predetermines social and economic outcomes,
higher education (and secular education in general) often has low prestige
and poor content. Conversely, in socially mobile, innovative societies,
university degrees from quality schools appear indispensable to the ambitious,
the status-conscious, and the genuinely inquisitive alike.

There are many individual and some cultural exceptions, but they mostly
prove the rule. Many Indians value a university education highly--not as
social confirmation, but as a means of escaping a preassigned social position.
The privileged of the Arabian Peninsula, on the other hand, regard an American
university degree (even from a booby-prize institution) as an essential
piece of jewelry, not unlike a Rolex watch. In all cultures, there are
individuals hungry for self-improvement and, sometimes, for knowledge.
But, statistically, we can know a society, and judge its potential, by
its commitment to education, with universities as the bellwether. Not all
states can afford their own Stanford or Harvard but, within their restraints,
their attempts to educate their populations still tell us a great deal
about national priorities and potential. Commitment and content cannot
fully substitute for a wealth of facilities, but they go a long way, whether
we speak of individuals or continents.

Any society that starves education is a loser. Cultures that do not
see inherent value in education are losers. This is even true for some
of our own sub-cultures--groups for whom education has little appeal as
means or end--and it is true for parts of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and the Arab world. A culture that cannot produce a single world-class
university is not going to conquer the world in any sphere.

America's universities are triumphant. Once beyond the silly debates
(or monologues) in the Liberal Arts faculties, our knowledge industry has
no precedent or peer. Even Europe's most famous universities, on the Rhine
or the Seine, are rotting and overcrowded. We attract the best faculty,
the best researchers, and the best student minds from the entire world.
This is not a trend subject to reversal; rather, it is self-reinforcing.

Yet there is even more to American success in education than four good
years at the "College of Musical Knowledge." The United States
is also far ahead of other states in the flexibility and utility of its
educational system. Even in Europe, the student's fate is determined early--and
woe to the late bloomer. You choose your course, or have it chosen for
you, and you are more or less stuck with it for life. In Germany, long
famous for its commitment to education, the individual who gains a basic
degree in one subject and then jumps to another field for graduate work
is marked as a Versager, a failure. In the US system, there are
second, third, and fourth chances. This flexible approach to building and
rebuilding our human capital is a tremendous economic asset, and it is
compounded by the trend toward continuing education in mid-life and for
seniors.

A geriatric revolution is occurring under our noses, with older Americans
"younger" than before in terms of capabilities, interests, and
attitudes--and much more apt to continue contributing to the common good.
We are headed for a world in the early decades of the next century when
many Americans may hit their peak earning years not in their fifties, but
in their sixties--then seventies. This not only provides sophisticated
talent to the labor pool, but maintains the worker as an asset to, rather
than a drain upon, our nation's economy. For all the fuss about the future
of social security, we may see a profound attitudinal change in the next
generation, when vigorous, high-earning seniors come to regard retirement
at today's age as an admission of failure or weakness, or just as a bore.
At the same time, more 20-year-old foreigners than ever will have no jobs
at all.

Investments in our educational system are "three-fers": they
are simultaneously investments in our economic, social, and military systems.
Education is our first line of defense. The rest of the world can be divided
into two kinds of societies, states, and cultures--those that struggle
and sacrifice to educate their members, and those that do not. Guess who
is going to do better in the hyper-competitive 21st century?

Workers of the World, Take a Nap!

Related to, but not quite identical with, national and cultural attitudes
toward education is the attitude toward work. Now, everyone has bad days
at the office, factory, training area, or virtual workplace, and the old
line, "It's not supposed to be fun--that's why they call it `work,'"
enjoys universal validity. Yet there are profoundly different attitudes
toward work on this planet. While most human beings must work to survive,
there are those who view work as a necessary evil and dream of its avoidance,
and then there are societies in which people hit the lottery and go back
to their jobs as telephone linemen. In many subsets of Latin American culture,
for example, there are two reasons to work: first to survive, then to grow
so wealthy that work is no longer necessary. It is a culture in which the
possession of wealth is not conceptually related to a responsibility to
work. It is the get-rich-quick, big-bucks-from-Heaven dream of some of
our own citizens. The goal is not achievement but possession, not accomplishment
but the power of leisure.

Consider any culture's heroes. Generally, the more macho or male-centric
the culture, the less emphasis there will be on steady work and achievement,
whether craftsmanship or Nobel Prize-winning research, and the more emphasis
there will be on wealth and power as the sole desirable end (apart, perhaps,
from the occasional religious vocation). As national heroes, it's hard
to beat Bill Gates. But even a sports star is better than a major narco-trafficker.

Generally, societies that do not find work in and of itself "pleasing
to God and requisite to Man," tend to be highly corrupt (low-education
and dogmatic-religion societies also are statistically prone to corruption,
and, if all three factors are in play, you may not want to invest in the
local stock exchange or tie your foreign policy to successful democratization).
The goal becomes the attainment of wealth by any means.

On the other hand, workaholic cultures, such as that of North America
north of the Rio Grande, or Japan, South Korea, and some other East Asian
states, can often compensate for deficits in other spheres, such as a lack
of natural resources or a geographical disadvantage. If a man or woman
has difficulty imagining a fulfilling life without work, he or she probably
belongs to a successful culture. Work has to be seen as a personal and
public responsibility, as good in and of itself, as spiritually necessary
to man. Otherwise, the society becomes an "evader" society. Russia
is strong, if flagging, on education. But the general attitude toward work
undercuts education. When the characters in Chekhov's "Three Sisters"
blather about the need to find redemption through work, the prescription
is dead on, but their lives and their society have gone so far off the
rails that the effect is one of satire. States and cultures "win"
just by getting up earlier and putting in eight honest hours and a little
overtime.

If you are seeking a worthy ally or business opportunity, go to a mid-level
government office in Country X an hour before the local lunchtime. If everybody
is busy with legitimate work, you've hit a winner. If there are many idle
hands, get out.

Using this Knowledge to Our Advantage

Faced with the complex reality of geopolitics and markets, we must often
go to Country X, Y, or Z against our better judgment. Despite failing in
all seven categories, Country X may have a strategic location that makes
it impossible to ignore. Country Y may have an internal market and regional
importance so significant that it would be foolish not to engage it, despite
the risks. Country Z may have resources that make a great deal of misery
on our part worth the sufferance. Yet even in such situations, it helps
to know what you are getting into. Some countries would devour investments
as surely as they would soldiers. Others just demand savvy and caution
on our part. Yet another might require a local ally or partner to whom
we can make ourselves indispensable. Whether engaging militarily or doing
business in another country, it gives us a tremendous advantage if we can
identify four things: their image of us, their actual situation, their
needs, and the needs they perceive themselves as having (the four never
connect seamlessly).

There are parallel dangers for military men and businessmen in taking
too narrow a view of the challenges posed by foreign states. An exclusive
focus on either raw military power or potential markets tells us little
about how people behave, believe, learn, work, fight, or buy. In fact,
the parallels between military and business interventions grow ever greater,
especially since these form two of the legs of our new national strategic
triad, along with the export of our culture (diplomacy is a minor and shrinking
factor, its contours defined ever more rigorously by economics).

The seven factors discussed above offer a pattern for an initial assessment
of the future potential of states that interest us. Obviously, the more
factors present in a given country, the worse off it will be--and these
factors rarely appear in isolation. Normally, a society that oppresses
women will do it under the aegis of a restrictive dominant religion that
will also insist on the censorship of information. Societies lacking a
strong work ethic rarely value education.

In the Middle East, it is possible to identify states where all seven
negatives apply; in Africa, many countries score between four and seven.
Countries that formerly suffered communist dictatorships vary enormously,
from Poland and the Czech Republic, with only a few rough edges, to Turkmenistan,
which scores six out of seven. Latin America has always been more various
than Norteamericanos realized, from feudal Mexico to dynamic, disciplined
Chile.

Ultimately, our businesses have it easier than our military in one crucial
respect: business losses are counted in dollars, not lives. But the same
cultural factors that will shape future state failure and spawn violent
conflicts make it difficult to do business successfully and legally. We
even suffer under similar "rules of engagement," whether those
placed on the military to dictate when a soldier may shoot or the legal
restraints under which US businesses must operate, imposing a significant
disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign competitors.

As a final note, the biggest pitfall in international interactions is
usually mutual misunderstanding. We do not understand them, but they do
not understand us either--although, thanks to the Americanization of world
media, they imagine they do. From mega-deals that collapsed because of
Russian rapacity to Saddam's conviction that the United States would not
fight, foreign counterparts, rivals, and opponents have whoppingly skewed
perceptions of American behaviors. In the end, military operations and
business partnerships are like dating--the advantage goes to the player
who sees with the most clarity.

We are heading into a turbulent, often violent new century. It will
be a time of great dangers and great opportunities. Some states will continue
to triumph, others will shift their relative positions, many will fail.
The future will never be fully predictable, but globalization means the
imposition of uniform rules by the most powerful actors. They are fundamentally
economic rules. For the first time, the world is converging toward a homogeneous
system, if not toward homogenous benefits from that system. The potential
of states is more predictable within known parameters than ever before.

We have seen the future, and it looks like us.

Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters (USA, Ret.) was assigned, prior to his
recent retirement, to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence,
where he was responsible for future warfare. Career and personal travels
have taken him to 45 countries. He has published and lectured widely on
military and international concerns. His seventh novel, The Devil's
Garden, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his tenth article
for Parameters.